Emily (2022), and when a dramatization is just bad

So, I watched this movie about Emily Bronte on Amazon Prime, called Emily (to its blandness). I was really looking forward to just watching a period piece ‘biopic’ about the Bronte sisters, because, despite their fame in the lit world, it’s weird that there’s so little about them in visual media.

From what I actually knew about the Bronte sisters prior to watching this (”a sister trio of writers, cool!”), what’s publicly available about them via documentaries and historians, I figure you’d have to try real, real hard to fuck up a dramatization about them.

And it’s to that end, I should’ve never underestimated director Frances O’Connor’s abilities, because, whew, lord, Emily was hot garbage on a sweltering day.

I really started thinking about how much the film (and novel) romance genre is informed by women’s particular brand of misogyny and sexism. You’ll see [white] women go on and on about sexism from men, especially in media. And not to discredit that, but, I’m honestly beginning to think it’s overcompensation.

No one throws women under the bus quite like other women.

Emily depicts the second best known Bronte sister as “so misunderstood” by her family, but especially by her sister Charlotte Bronte - who is depicted like the stuffy, uncool competitor of another man’s affections, with little to no interest in writing and imagination.

Anne Bronte is basically a background extra with little to no dialog who crumbles under the peer pressure of Charlotte who despises Emily’s need to turn every situation into an opportunity for storytelling.

Like, this film’s beef with Charlotte Bronte, and disinterest in Anne Bronte, is baffling. I come here for sister vibes, and instead I get Mean Girls. The fuck.

Emily Bronte is the embodiment of “not like the other girls”. She hangs with the boys, she smokes, drinks, she has a thinly veiled incestuous relationship with her brother, Branwell Bronte, and fucks generically hot priests (Oliver Jackson Cohen in maybe one the less inspired roles of his career).

Emily Bronte could not be any more of the 21st century white woman’s idea of the “cool girl who reads dark academia” if O’Connor taped the description on actress Emma Mackey’s head.

I can’t stress how much priority this film puts on male characters vs female characters as Emily Bronte’s choice of satellites. And as a justification for why she wrote Wuthering Heights, it’s boringly embarrassing.

Comparatively, Emily makes 2007′s Becoming Jane (starring Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen with a struggle accent) look like an Oscar winning drama (spoilers: I like that movie). Jane, at the very least, isn’t interested in the vilification or minimization of other female characters (that aren’t Professor McGonagall), even as it charts an equally fictionalized (or speculative) romance between Austen and James MacAvoy’s  Thomas Lefroy (one that argues he was key in making her writing hit different).

While it’s clearly influenced by Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), Jane Austen’s relationships with her family, particularly her sister, matter in her story arc in the same way Elizabeth Bennett’s do in the aforementioned film. There’s sense of balance, however dramatized Austen’s story became for that film for the sake of a romance plot.

Comparatively, Emily depicts the Bronte family, sans her brother, as obstacles (if they aren’t nonevents) to her indulgences because they’re “oh, so ashamed of her proclivities”. Additionally, I just don’t care about Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s William Weightwright. Nigga is boring. I’d sooner believe Bly Manor’s Peter Quint (Jackson-Cohen, again) was a Healthcliff and homeboy was inspired by whole another ‘gothic lit’ author (Henry James).

For lack of a better word, I really hated this movie. There’s the argument that if you know next to nothing about the Bronte sisters that you might enjoy it. But even on that level, there’s a lot about the storytelling that is bland, and outright hateful imho.

Anyway, I hated everything (except maybe the score, which, as other have said, is overbearing for no rasin). It can die in a fire and be lost to the void of history.

Simone Simon in Olivia (1951) dir. Jacqueline Audry

Dana Terrace

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual

DOB: 8 December 1990

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Animator, cartoonist, writer, director, producer, voice actress

Uniform policy board meeting in progress

just watched shiny happy people and it was an ok docuseries overall (if you don't know it's a documentary about the duggar family and fundamentalism/IBLP/Bill Gothard more generally), but as with other documentaries in this style, it often heavily covers the aspects of misogyny, patriarchy, and abuse (which are very important to cover!), but really only minimally focuses (if at all) on the depth to which Christian fundamentalism is at its core about advancing white supremacy and white supremacist goals. Like they spend an episode talking about how the purpose of families having as many children as possible is to push them into conservative leadership (with the ultimate goal of creating Christian theocracy), but they only focus on how they want to pass like anti-abortion stuff not their assuredly racist positions otherwise. Like focusing solely on the narratives and abuse of white women (and some white men) from the perspective of these people means that you only hear their limited perspective on the situation. Which means they've grown enough to understand how this religion/cult/sect oppressed them but not anyone different from them. non-white people are almost entirely absent from the series outside of when white people go/have gone on mission trips and the documentary makers never confront the people who they interviewed who've gone on mission trips about the neocolonialism they're engaging in through these trips. Even from the perspective of you've spent your whole life hearing this narrative of Christianity that you know is fucked up and terrible for you, but then you think you've unlearned all of this enough to go give christian teachings to others without perpetuating these same narratives?? Like one (professor?) guy mentions racism all of once and it's like?? I also feel like the documentary makers in spite of how political this documentary is fail to address the politics of those they are interviewing. They interview several people close to the duggar family/are in the duggar family who are like still very conservative and present their narrative uncritically. anyway in conclusion, documentaries on institutions like iblp and the catholic church etc often focus solely on the oppression faced by white women and children in that institution without examining the larger context of white supremacy and racism that kind of patriachy is based in and they should change that

oscars drama is always embarrassing but today especially because why are people acting like greta gerwig and margo robbie are the only women to ever exist within the film industry and ignoring and throwing the women who got nominated over them under the bus? and of course not a single person is talking about greta lee and celine song being snubbed for past lives (a better film in my opinion,) I wonder why... 😒

Women in Film Challenge 2024: [34/52] Angels Wear White, dir. Vivian Qu (China, 2018)

That kind of thing would never happen to me.

Seen in 2024:

Ballad of a White Cow (Behtash Sanaeeha & Maryam Moqadam), 2020

gonna be annoying in the tags

...wait, people are genuinely upset that greta gerwig didnt get nominated for best director for the toy commercial movie when the movie got nominations for best supporting actor, best supporting actress, best original song, best production design, best costume design, best picture, and best adapted screenplay for which greta gerwig was nominated?

Don't come for me because I don't feel like elaborating right now, but the reason people conflate the racism/orientalism in GRRM's writing that often shows up in proximity to Dany, with Dany, the character in universe, being a "racist white imperialist"... is misogyny.

In this essay I will...

A White Butterfly on a Bus

thinking about how as i kid i would watch those scenes on tv where a (occasionally dark skinned & black) woman would act all seductive and flirty to try and “seduce” a man and how those scenes would make me feel all gross and icky. i now realise i felt like that because i’m normal, Godbless

Anna Rust

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Pansexual

DOB: 3 May 1995

Ethnicity: White - English

Occupation: Actress, director, producer, screenwriter

Fruit of Paradise (1970) Věra Chytilová

See what you can get when you hire english-speaking actors who doesn’t have to be white?? These singaporean actors can ACT